'Da Vinci Code' to open Cannes festival

Ron Howard's film adaptation of Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code will open the 59th Cannes Film Festival on May 17.

The film starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou will have its general release two days later and come out in French theatres the same day.

The Da Vinci Code will screen out of competition at the prestigious festival on the French Riviera.

Howard first came to the Cannes festival in 1988 with Willow and has since entered Far and Away in 1992 and Ed TV in 1999. He won an Oscar for best director and best picture for A Beautiful Mind in 2002.

Happy Together director Won Kar Wai has been named as president of the Cannes festival jury, the first Chinese president in the event's history.  The slate of films for the 11-day festival has yet to be announced.

The Da Vinci Code uses the Louvre Museum in Paris as a main backdrop for a story about an American professor who discovers the clues to a murder buried in the works of Leonardo da Vinci.

The thriller purports that da Vinci left coded messages proving that Jesus never claimed to be divine, that he married Mary Magdalene and had children and that their bloodline survives.

In the novel, which has sold about 30 million copies worldwide, there is speculation about conspiracies within the church to suppress this knowledge.

The Vatican has objected to the premise of The Da Vinci Code, both the book and the film. Last week the conservative church group Opus Dei demanded the film be given an adult only rating.

Children should be protected from the "insidious lies" about Catholicism that are part of the story, Opus Dei said. 

Last year the Vatican appointed a prominent church leader, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Archbishop of Genoa, to take on the job of debunking the theories presented in The Da Vinci Code.